Unbreakable

Only one player has gotten more than 750 hits from age 39 on: Pete Rose. (US Presswire)

Twitter is a remarkable thing. On Saturday, I discovered that Pete Rose is on Twitter. Anyway, it SEEMS to be Pete Rose … based on the fact that this Twitter page is linked from Rose’s official Web site.

But, even though it is linked, there seems some dubious things about it. For one thing, the account had been active for like two weeks and yet when I first checked in, Pete had like only 500 followers (at last check, it was a bit more than 2,000). For another, there were a few tweets that didn’t exactly sound like Pete — a whole lot of “Check out PeteRose (dot) com”-type pitches. But, like I said, it is the account that links from the official site, and there WERE some pretty cool tweets on there. So I decided to test it out.

I tweeted: “Let’s find out if Pete Rose is real. What is the most unbreakable record in in baseball besides the hit record?”

There are three things I thought about as I tweeted this. One, there is no way — absolutely no way — Pete Rose could resist answering. Pete Rose, for whatever else you can and will say about him, loves talking baseball. It is an obsession with him. I have interviewed him numerous times and every time he seemed reluctant to talk at the start, and every time he ended up talking for hours because the guy can’t help himself. He loves talking about pitching, about hitting, about the ways kids play today, about that one time in San Francisco, about that other time at Shea, about Derek Jeter’s chances for 4,000 hits (laughter) about how he would hit Mariano Rivera (back off the plate so a cutter would not saw him off) and on and on and on. Of course, with Pete, beyond the baseball, you get plenty of color commentary about other things, but the context is baseball. He loves it.

Two, I figured Pete would appreciate the “besides the hit record” line.Three, I’ve already asked him this once before, in one of our interviews, and he gave the great answer: The most unbreakable record, he said, was Johnny Vander Meer’s consecutive no-hitters because, to break it, someone would have to throw THREE no-hitters in a row. I figured that if Pete gave that as his answer, I would know he was the man.

As it turned out, Twitter Pete did not give that as his answer. He said the most unbreakable record was Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak. Of course, this doesn’t mean Twitter Pete is not Real Pete. He could have been just joking about Vander Meer. He could have changed his mind. He could have been standing nearby when someone running his Twitter account asked him and he just said, off the top of his head, “Yeah, just type in DiMaggio.” I don’t have the illusion that Pete himself is standing at the computer typing in Twitter responses day and night.

But if that’s not fun enough — engaging Twitter Pete Rose on a Saturday afternoon — I got a bunch of other people responding what they think the most unbreakable record is in baseball. So, for fun, I thought I’d throw together off the top of my head the 10 baseball records that are unlikeliest to be broken, in order:

1. Cy Young’s 511 victories.

I’ve written before that I don’t even think this should count as a record. Young won 72 of those games when the pitcher’s mound was 50 feet from home plate, won another 425 games before the ball had a cork center and won all 511 of his games when the spitball was legal. He averaged 43 starts a year his first 13 full seasons, and his first four full seasons he started 46, 49, 46 and 47 games. This is not to downplay Cy Young’s greatness, it is only to say that it was a different game.

But as long as that counts as the official record, it is unbreakable. No pitcher has won 25 games in a season since 1990 — and to get to 511 you would have to win 25 games 20 YEARS in a row, and then win another 11 somehow. It cannot be broken, not the way the game is going.

With the 511 victories goes other unbreakable Cy Young records — his 749 complete games, his 7,356 innings pitched, and probably his 316 losses, though the last record is the most reachable, I think. Nolan Ryan came staggeringly close with 292 losses. Phil Niekro (274 losses), Gaylord Perry (265 losses) and Don Sutton (256 losses) suggest the loss record is not quite as unbreakable as the others.

Same theme as Cy Young’s win record: can’t ever happen again unless there’s a titanic change in the way the game is played, and the rules that govern it. Old Hoss’ numbers from that year, 1884, are so much fun to see.

Record: 59-12ERA: 1.38Strikeouts: 441WAR: 18.6

3. Sam Crawford’s 309 triples.

Again, this comes from a different time … Crawford played in the deadball era when, one year, he led the league with seven home runs. In the triples Top 10 list, the only one who played after World War II was Stan Musial, and his 177 triples is a long way down from Crawford. Willie Wilson has the most triples for anyone over the last 50 years, and he did not have even HALF as many as Crawford. The active leader for triples is Carl Crawford, with 112; if he could get healthy again, he might pass Wilson. He won’t get within a direct flight of unrelated Sam Crawford.

4. Nolan Ryan’s 2,795 walks.

I do believe Ryan’s strikeout record is achievable. I’m not saying that I’m betting on it; I’m just saying it’s possible. Strikeouts are way up around baseball. And the truth is that Randy Johnson came within 850 or so, and Johnson did not have his first 200-strikeout season until the year he turned 27. If Johnson had reached the big leagues at 23 or 24 and still pitched into his 40s, he would have broken the record. That’s a big if, I understand, but I’m just saying it’s possible.

The walks record? Impossible. Won’t get broken. Ryan walked almost 1,000 more batters than anyone else in baseball history. He walked almost twice as many batters as Roger Clemens. How good do you have to be to be that wild and have that long of a career? Good enough that it will never happen again.

5. Connie Mack’s 3,731victories and 3,948 losses as a manager

Tony La Russa was actually someone who might have challenged the victories record, had he been allowed to manage until he was 80 (which, at times, it appeared he might be).

Think of it this way: To get to 3,731 victories, a manager would have to win 100-plus games 37 YEARS in a row. No manager other than Mack has ever managed 37 years at all. In many ways, the losses record — like Ryan’s walk record — is even more impressive.

If Halladay had five more decades like the last one … he would still fall short of Walter Johnson’s record.

7. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

I know this was Twitter Pete’s choice, and it’s the choice of many people and I certainly admire the streak very much. It probably won’t be broken for all the reasons that have been discussed through the years — the ridiculous challenge of maintaining that kind of consistency, the building pressure as you get closer, the media circus that would undoubtedly make life miserable and so on. But unlike some of these other records, it COULD conceivably happen. The game’s evolution would prevent anyone from breaking Young’s record or Crawford’s or Johnson’s … it would take a fundamental shift in the very structure of baseball for anyone to break one of those records.

The DiMaggio record, meanwhile, would not take that kind of seismic change. It would take a batter getting a hit in 56 straight games. I don’t mean to downplay that … it’s obviously a Herculean task, one that mathematicians have called all but impossible. But compared to the league suddenly allowing pitchers to start 45 or 50 games in a season, it could happen.

The way I figure it: It would take an Ichiro-type player, a leadoff hitter who did not strike out or walk very much. It would help if he played in a great hitters’ ballpark, like Colorado in the 1990s or Fenway Park in the 1980s. And it really would take someone with the attitude of Pete Rose, not only someone determined to get a hit every day, but someone who THRIVES in the spotlight, loves the attention. Rose’s 44-game hitting streak was just two weeks shy of DiMaggio’s, and Rose was 37 at the time. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t expect to see this record broken in my lifetime. But unlike the top six, I could not say I GUARANTEE it won’t be broken in my lifetime.

8. Rickey Henderson’s 1,406 stolen bases

As I’ve written before, I like to look at career records by dividing them by 20 years. For instance, Barry Bonds’ career home run record of 762 (or, if you prefer, Hank Aaron’s record of 755) divides out to 38 home runs per year over 20 years. That’s a GOOD number, but it’s not unheard of; last year, five guys hit 38 or more home runs. In 1996, 21 players hit 38 or more home runs.

Rose’s hit record breaks down to 213 hits for 20 years, which is high, but guys get that many hits. Tris Speaker’s doubles record of 792 divides out to 40 doubles a year. Guys do that every season.

Rickey Henderson’s stolen base record averages out to more than 70 stolen bases every year for 20 years.

Since 2000, exactly ONE player has stolen more than 70 bases in a season (Jose Reyes in 2007). Only 11 times in baseball history has more than one person in a season stolen more than 70 bases, and six of those seasons one of the players was Rickey Henderson.

It’s possible — not likely, but possible — that the game will shift back to the running game. Even if that happens, I doubt anyone ever will get within 500 stolen bases of Rickey Henderson.

9. Pete Rose’s 4,256 career hits

I think about Ichiro. He played his first year in America when he was 27 years old. At 27, Pete Rose already had 900 hits (well, 899 to be exact). So if you added those 899 to Ichiro’s total, he would have 3,387 hits … and he’s 38 years old.

At the end of his 38-year-old season, Rose had 3,372 hits … so if you give Ichiro Rose’s start, Ichiro would be ahead of Rose … perhaps 100 or 150 hits ahead of him by the end of this season.

But, that would STILL leave Ichiro some 750 hits shy of the record. You know how many people have gotten more than 750 hits from age 39 on? One: Pete Rose. And that’s because he was an effective hitter until he turned 40 (a rarity), and he was determined and ingenious enough to stay in the game and get a lot of at-bats until he was 45 (an even greater rarity).

For someone to break Pete Rose’s record they would need to want it AS MUCH AS PETE ROSE did. Not impossible. Highly unlikely, though.

10. Barry Bonds’ .609 on-base percentage for a single season.

Yes, everybody has an opinion about what Barry Bonds’ unmatchable stretch of baseball, what was behind it, how much steroid use impacted it, whether or not it should count and so on. But the record is on the books — nobody will ever get on base 61 percent of the time again. To give you an idea, the year Ty Cobb hit .420, his on-base percentage was .467. The year George Brett hit .390, his on-base percentage was .454. In Babe Ruth’s greatest year, his on-base percentage was .545. Even Ted Williams, the greatest on-base machine the game has ever known, never finished a season within 50 percentage points of Bonds’ record.

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65 thoughts on “Unbreakable”

The one thing I always come back to in these discussions is the evolution of the game. Maybe there is going to be a change in philosophy, and teams will do something radically different – like have an opener who pitches the first 1 or 2 innings, then bring in the middle guy to pitch innings 3-6, and then other relievers. In this case, you could have a middle(r) pitching in 80 or so games a year, and with a good team, could start getting 40 or 50 wins a year. Now this sound far fetched, but if it happens, all bets are off re the all time Wins records.

Similarly, I’ve heard some fairly cogent arguments for changing the game so that all hitters start with a 1-1 count (won’t get into the details, but essentially, OPS of hitters passing through a 1-1 count is essentially the same as starting at a 0-0 count). This would lead to a dramatic change in the number of pitches thrown, increasing CG, and possibly changing things back to a 4 man rotation. Do this and some of the other records CG, shutouts, W, L are all in play again. How often could Maddux have pitched if he only needed 60 or so pitches for a CG?

So, it seems like you have to presume that the game isn’t going to change to talk about this, but it always does. I’m sure in 1917, someone was thinking that the career HR record of 138 was unbreakable – that was almost than 7 HR a year for 20 years – but then Babe Ruth came along and changed everyone’s ideas about what is possible.

What you are talking about essentially involves making three balls for a walk and two strikes for a strikeout. I don’t think there is any chance of that happening; even considering most of the changes the sport has gone through over the years, balls and strikes are among the longest-set rules in the game: four balls in a walk goes back to 1889, and three strikes all the way back to anteprofessional times.

I do think you are right about unforeseen changes, though. The rules will evolve and there will be both intended and unintended consequences to the rulebook.

If a player started a game tonight, and played 2,633 games in a row, they would break Cal Ripken’s consecutive games record sometime in late July of the 2028 season.

I guess it would be theoretically possible–obviously since we aren’t that far past when Cal did it. However, while most of those records are simply a matter of player (or in Mack’s case, team) production, to break a consecutive games record involves the playing ability to remain in the lineup for the entire time, the ability and the luck to stay healthy as well as to play through pain, and the personality to make the manager want to keep you in the lineup no matter how poor the slump.

One thing I’ve learned is not to conjecture about this stuff. As a kid growing up in the 1970s it was widely held that Lou Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games played was the most unbreakable record in the game. Twenty years later Cal Ripken had it. Some of the 19th century marks are probably not reachable, but the game those guys were playing wasn’t baseball.

I wouldn’t bet on it, but I think that Pujols has a chance to beat the outs record. Pujols is “32”, has a 10 year contract ahead of him, and has 4746 outs. Not saying it will happen, but I like those odds better than most.

I will go with Ducky Medwick’s 2,270 hits during a single presidential administration. At least I think he’s the record holder (he had 182 hits in 1933 and played through the war). That one will take a constitutional amendment to break (and it was easier for me to determine the record holder than most games played).

According to what I saw, Ichiro had 1278 hits in Japan. If that’s correct, it puts him at 3766 today.

Alternatively, if you discount his Japanese totals by about 10% (on the theory that his MLB batting average of .324 is .92 of his Japanese .350), he’s still over 3600. At the margins, those extra 250 hits would make a pretty big difference.

Ichiro would only have to put up Rose-level performance from now until he’s 42, not 45.

I’m throwing a flag on this one. Japanese hit totals are not considered in any MLB record book, just like Canadian Football totals are not included in NFL records. Otherwise, Warren Moon would hold all NFL passing records & Doug Flutie would be a title (or two) ahead of Terry Bradshaw.

Obviously he has a long way to go, but if anyone has the confidence/tenacity to break Rose or Dimaggio’s records, it is Bryce Harper – only 19 and he stole home after the pitcher plunked him. That kid has guts.

We’re not discounting it because of the length of season or number of games. We’re discounting it because Ichiro was facing a much lower level of pitching in much smaller ball parks. If we’re including NPB numbers, why not also add in AAA numbers?

Actually, I don’t think either poster was specifically talking about Ichiro breaking Rose’s record, what they were saying (If I might put words in their mouth), is if, in an alternate universe Ichiro had never played in Japan, but rather played in the US from the beginning, and using his Japanese and ML numbers as a guidepost, we could postulate that he could have broken Rose’s record. Ergo, it is plausible that an Ichiro type player could, in fact, one day break Rose’s record. Much more plausible than thinking someone is going to win 512 games as a pitcher.

How about: Fernando Tatis’ record of 8 RBIs in an inning. It would only take one horrendous pitching-inning to break it, but I’ve never seen someone get three plate appearances in one inning. Guessing it’s mighty rare.

8 RBI in an inning could be beaten, the fact that he not only hit 2 grand slams in that inning off THE SAME PITCHER will never be beaten. Someone might even hit three grand slams in an inning, but it will never ever be off the same pitcher.

3 hits in an inning has happened (Johnny Damon was the last player to do it, I think.) Of course, to get at least 9 RBI, there would have to be at least two men on base for every hit, but given that we’re talking about a hypothetical horrendously pitched inning that’s possible.

I think Jeter has a legit shot at reaching Rose’s hit record. He is 1,097 hits shy. The Yankees refuse to move him lower in the line up so as long as he’s healthy, he’ll get 600 at bats a year. If Jeter can get 3,500 more at bats and bat .280 doing so, he would be about 100 hits shy of Rose. It’s going to take 6 or 7 years but it’s possible.

I do think he needs to have at least 400 hits between this year and next year. He has 75 right now. But if anyone is going to do it, it’s Jeter.

It is not impossible that the young Ichiro could have played 10 years in MLB then retired to Japan with a higher career batting average than Ty Cobb. The theme of the first few is that the game has changed to make those achievements impossible in the current game, but I don’t see that for Cobb.

On the other hand, during Wade Boggs’ heyday some of my Red Sox fan friends were opining that he could break Cobb’s record … until I pointed out he’d actually have to improve to 5 points above his current average and hold that pace for 5 years. Even for a preternatural talent like Ichiro or Boggs, this would be a difficult thing to do.

My favorite unbreakable record has always been the first one Joe mentioned, for the same reason: to break it you have to throw three no-hitters.

Many records are tough to envision being broken, e.g. 511 wins, because the game has changed so much that’s its basically impossible to have the opportunity to break it the way the game is played right now. But opportunity-wise all you need is three starts break Van der Meer’s record.

I doubt anyone has thrown three consecutive complete games in the past 10 years, let along three consecutive shutouts. Three consecutive no-hitters has such a low probability that it might as well be zero.

I’ll go along with you on Cy Young but part of your rationale just doesn’t work for me. Didn’t the guys Cy was pitching against throw a cork-centered ball from 50 feet to? And could they legally throw a spitball if they chose to? Since it’s a zero some game played on a level playing field, as long as they’re playing under the same rules it makes no deference if the ball has a corked centered or if it’s made outta wood.

Now if you’re talking HRs allowed or ERA that’s a different matter. But W’s – no.

Rickey Henderson’s record will be under threat because Billy Hamilton is that good. He has 63 steals ALREADY this year(only 13 CS)after 103 last year in A and A+ ball. If he makes it to the majors in the next two years, a distinct possibility, he will absolutely be a threat to break the record.

A Ball? Really? You should look at the top base stealers of all time. Take Lou Brock. 938 career steals. Had 118 one year. Had 56 as late as age 37. Led the league in steals 8 times….. and he’s still nearly 500 steals behind Rickey Henderson. To steal 1400 bases, you have to get on base a lot (.400 OBP), stay healthy, not lose a step into your late 30’s and play 20+ years. Highly unlikely.

Henderson also lucked out, a bit, when Billy Martin took over as manager in Rickey’s secon season. Martin exploited Rickey’s speed to the extreme, going so far as to have Rickey attempt a steal almost every time he reached base in the 1st inning in ’82. If you look at the splits from that year you see that Rickey had 26 singles, 7 doubles, 23 walks and 4 reaches on an error. That adds up to 60 times on base when leading off in the 1st inning. He turned this into 41 stolen bases and 20 times caught stealing. Only a madman like Billy Martin would sanction this kind of thing. And this led to Rickey’s base stealing reputation which perhaps almost forced managers to let him steal as much as he did later on.

Since no hitters we’re mentioned, Nolan Ryan’s 7 is a record that won’t likely be broken. Some folks in Detroit have mentioned that Verlander could do it, since he already has two of them. But, to break the record he needs to throw 6 more…

Had Ty Cobb been willing to continue to play until several years after he was no longer an effective hitter, I am quite sure that the 5000+ hits he would have would be considered the most unbreakable record.

Good point, but to be fair, a seismic shift in baseball is far less likely than in any other sport. Many people view changing the rules baseball as heresy… “The rules are perfect! We don’t care that games take 4 hours b/c managers can bring in unlimited relievers.”

What about a fully ambidextrous pitcher who can start twice per rotation? I imagine, given the strain on the legs, he would have to be more of a knuckler or something. Even then, he might need to be a middle reliever who came in when the game was still in doubt. And of course, since we’ve never had a famous “switch-pitcher,” it is very likely I am missing some part of the equation here.

Cy Young’s is the hardest here, seems to me. Give the man more credit than you do, Joe Poz. The game is changing ALL THE TIME, like it or not. Slagging Cy for being who he was, when he was, is just silly.

1. Owen “Chief” Wilson hit 36 triples in 1912, 100 years ago this season. Even in the minor leagues, no one’s ever matched that season total.

2. A more unbreakable record than Vander Meer’s is Ed “Big Ed” Reulbach’s two complete game shutouts on the same day. Reulbach pitched them for the Cubs on September 26, 1908 against the Brooklyn Superbas. This was exactly three days after Merkle’s Boner, and the Giants’ gonfalon bubble was getting closer to bursting for good.

To break Reulbach’s record, someone would have to throw *three* complete game shutouts in the same day.

NEXT ACTIVE RUNNER UP HAS ONLY WITH 2822 HITS IN 14 SEASONS
Ichiro Suzuki
THAT’S
1434 HITS SHORT
HOWEVER HE WOULD ONLY HAVE TO BAT 144 HITS PER SEASON FOR NEXT 10 YEARS(EASY?)
BUT PROBLEM IS”
HE ONLY AVERAGED
115 PER SEASON FOR THE PAST 5 SEASON